Sara Ganim, the 24-year-old Patriot News reporter who broke the story that a grand jury was investigating Penn State Assistant Football Coach Jerry Sandusky for sexual abuse allegations, has won a richly deserved 2012 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.
In regards to ESPN’s justification for basically waiting eight years to expose a child molester:
From a professional standpoint our role as a journalist is to seek out information and vet that information and when we’re satisfied with the credibility of that information to report it to the public. It’s what journalists do. It’s not necessarily the journalist’s role to go to the police with potential evidence that at the time we didn’t believe was strong enough to report ourselves.
We also were aware at that time that Bobby Davis had gone to the Syracuse Police in 2002 and told them about these allegations and he had been told by them that the statute of limitations had expired. So we were fully under the impression that the police had been made aware of the story and had decided not to pursue it.
All journalists could be asking themselves this very same question: What role should journalists play in providing information that may or may not have been reported? It’s complex and something we must continue to evaluate.
ESPN has thoughts on journalism? Since when? And why now?
Wasn’t this guy helping broadcast coverage of the Penn State game this past weekend? The very idea of an ethical code at the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network would be laughable if it didn’t involve downplaying the molestation of children in favor of preserving some jackass coach’s “legacy.”
“In this world, it is perfectly fine to say that a president is inept or even somewhat corrupt. A titillating, tawdry sex scandal, such as the Bill Clinton brouhaha, can be fun, even desirable as a way of keeping entertainment levels high. Such revelations are all just part of the political cycle. But to acknowledge that our highest political officials are felons (which is what people are, by definition, who break our laws) or war criminals (which is what people are, by definition, who violate the laws of war) is to threaten the system of power, and that is unthinkable. Above all else, media figures are desperate to maintain the current power structure, as it is their role within it that provides them with prominence, wealth, and self-esteem. Their prime mandate then becomes protecting and defending Washington, which means attacking anyone who would dare suggest that the government has been criminal at its core.”
Okay, this is pretty bad, even worse than Fox’s usual non-scientific, self-selection “polls.”
- “Hmm, yes I’d like my child to find a fulfilling career (how?) in a protest movement that is barely two months old.”
- How are “other” and “neither” two distinct categories? Do some parents want their children to become some sort of protesting executive? Do they want their kids to become daytraders in Zuccotti park?
- “Would you rather your child grow up to be an astronaut or a seahorse?”
Since this doesn’t come with their usual “non-scientific” disclaimer, I assume they paid actual money to ask people these questions, which shows how badly they’re grasping at straws to keep the narrative going. The beauty of this poll from a propaganda standpoint is that it was on screen for maybe five seconds before Shepard Smith and Co. moved on to questions about who actually started the violence at Occupy Oakland, as if this was ever in dispute. While anybody who is paying attention would immediately notice how asinine the poll is, for the passive Fox viewer, this reinforces the idea that this is a black and white, 50/50 struggle, further narrowing the frame of the discussion, backing it up with a nice, easily digestible graphic.
I AM THE 8 PERCENT
(Also: Seahorse.)
“I don’t so much mind that newspapers are dying — it’s watching them commit suicide that pisses me off.”
Gannett Co., the largest employer of journalists in the United States, laid off 700 employees Tuesday.
Fascinating Al Jazeera investigation:
When the Libyan intelligence operative Abdel Baset al-Megrahi eventually dies of the prostate cancer that so controversially won him his freedom from a Scottish prison, his death will trigger headlines around the world.
But few tears will be shed for the only man ever found guilty of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 – until 9/11, the most lethal terrorist attack ever on American civilians.
Certainly not by the American families, who felt shock and revulsion at al-Megrahi’s release. Nor by American politicians, infuriated at the long list of British and Scottish officials who have refused to testify before a Senate committee investigating possible backroom deals involving Scottish and British officials, British commercial interests and the Libyan government.
Yet by the accounts of those who knew him best, the convicted man himself will go to his grave insisting he was innocent of the murder of the 270 passengers, crew and residents, who perished at Lockerbie in Scotland, that December night.
Drawing exclusively on a previously confidential, legal report, The Pan Am Bomber reveals the evidence that would have been presented in al-Megrahi’s stillborn appeal against his conviction.
Our investigation is backed up by 97 gigabytes of official documents, whistleblower testimony and photographic evidence - all of which will explain why and how al-Megrahi’s conviction was fatally flawed. It reveals how the chain of evidence used to convict al-Megrahi was broken and, in at least one crucial instance, tampered with.
It also shows why it was in the interest of all of the parties (except the convicted man himself) to make sure that the appeal was never heard.
TV news veteran Jim Lehrer retires:
PBS NewsHour, an hour of news, was based on the suddenly ancient idea that people sit down in front of their televisions to watch an uninterrupted hour of news. Doesn’t that, in this age of smartphones and Twitter and a million other points of electronic light, have kind of a when-dinosaurs-roamed-the-Earth ring to it?
Lehrer doesn’t flinch as he breaks into an easy chuckle.
“If we were starting the show now, we’d have to call it The NewsBlip, or The NewsBlink. The truth is our roots are very old-fashioned, but we are adapting to accommodate new desires. There’s going to be a new generation of gatekeepers; they’re not going to old white guys like me.
“But we still need gatekeepers, and those gatekeepers need to be professional journalists.”
At a time when all the buzz is centered on the notion of “citizen journalists,” such talk runs the risk of being dismissed as the worst kind of fuddy-duddyism. Lehrer is unmoved.
“I think people are slowly realizing that you need to know the facts before we can have an informed opinion — what exactly did happen, what were the contents of the speech, what does the birth certificate say? And for that you need a news source you can trust.
“A ‘citizen journalist’ may provide a tip for a story, but I would no more want to rely on citizen journalists for the news than I would a citizen doctor for my surgery.”
Jim Gray must’ve been absent for those reporting classes when the professor was stressing the idea to “report the news, don’t be the news”:
The latest episode came on Thursday at Riviera, when Gray got in a heated argument with Dustin Johnson’s caddie, to the point that The Golf Channel has removed Gray from their coverage this week from the Northern Trust Open.
According to USA Today’s Michael McCarthy, Johnson’s caddie went into a profanity-laced screaming match with Gray after he reported on The Golf Channel earlier that day that Johnson had landed a two-shot penalty for being late to the tee.
Johnson’s caddie, Bobby Brown, took most of the heat for the late tee-time arrival, with Dustin even commenting after the round that he doesn’t look at the time, leaving that up to the caddie.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that Gray might have been busy back in those journalism classes already working on profoundly horrific sign-offs for radio broadcasts of the Super Bowl (last year he referred to New Orleans as a “city that was ravaged by wind”).
Terrific parody of this year’s Super Bowl disaster here.
Glenn Greenwald FTWWhat we love about this clip: Glenn Greenwald calls out not one but TWO CNN personalities for being biased against Wikileaks. Greenwald, while obviously in Julian Assange’s court, nevertheless makes multiple great points about the similarities between what journalism is and what Wikileaks is. Fact of matter – Wikileaks is creative destruction to government secrecy, and that’s why the government is uncomfortable. Now’s a good time to mention that CNN passed on releasing Wikileaks material. So did the Wall Street Journal. (thanks diegueno)
(Source: youtube.com)
“Working in journalism these days involves a certain amount of choosing your poison. True’s dismissal added a note of uncertainty to a job Dumke had already begun to wonder if he’d been doing long enough. The future’s no more certain at CNC, which nine months in doesn’t have much to show for itself but the four pages a week it produces for the regional edition of the New York Times and a promise that sooner or later it will unveil ‘an innovative news site dedicated to building communities through quality journalism.’ But cofounder and editor Jim O’Shea, a former Tribune managing editor, has assembled an impressive staff, its core consisting of Tribune refugees whose age and experience strongly suggest an old-school regard for substance.”
Michael Miner, “Mick Dumke Is Crossing the Street”
As long as my former professor stays in the Second City, then we’re all going to be OK—only exception, of course, being Shortshanks & Co.
Aldermen rush through a gun-control law they’ve barely read to replace a gun-control law nobody seems to have enforced. Who really benefits? Mayor Daley.
Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration, by Jeffrey Kaye
Kaye calls into question our current policies regarding immigration, quite rightly observing that if you build a 50 foot wall, someone will bring a 51 foot ladder.
